Internal LAN: 4 boxen; one W2K box, one Sparc 10 running Solaris, one Wintel box runnning various Linux distros depending on the day and week, and one laptop running QNX or XP depending on drive installed.

Onle the laptop uses wireless; all other boxen are hardwired to the router or a Netgear hub uplinked to the router.

Problems:

Checked the HCL and proceeded to install as all mentioned above is compatible with fBSD 4.7. All went well and was able to boot into the CLI.

1.) I was unable to connect to my LAN or the net, and the NIC does not show up when I do ifconfig. Seems the driver needs to be compliled into the kernel.I did so but mistakenly used the driver for the SMC Ultra card. Closer examination seems to indicate my card actually uses the WDC "we" driver. I tried to find that in the ports collection and could not.

2.)Problems with X. While this box will primarily be devoted to remote admin of other BSD boxen. I'll telnet in but want to be familiar with all structures of BSD before doing so. I'd like to be able to run Mozilla. X configured well but crashed when I did start x. Error message was along the lines of "no screens available.) Release 4.7 of FreeBSD uses version 4.x.x of XFree86, which is by all reports compatible with my video card.

Questions:

1. How should I resolve the most pressing issue, that of network connectivity? Would I be better of using an older release of fBSD? That's certainly an option. I'm not married to the idea of 4.7, just that it was the quickest download on available mirrors when I dloaded.

2. Is compiling the driver into the kernel the best option, and what is the best way to do it? A brief procedual sketch of how to do this from the CLI would help.

3. Any ideas on the XFree issue?

I've done this sort of thing with Redhat in the old days (5.x) and earlier.Seems I've been spoiled using the newer Linux distros.